


Generic Video Game Expo

by noun



Category: Halt and Catch Fire
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Conventions, F/M, One Night Stands, Size Kink, featuring most of Team Mutiny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 19:33:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15914832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noun/pseuds/noun
Summary: In which Mutiny is an indie dev studio, and attends a PAX expy to promote the demo for their new puzzle RPG, Pilgrim.





	Generic Video Game Expo

**Author's Note:**

> This exists because a friend and I spent an evening talking shit about video game dev bros and how the only shirts they own are nerdy graphic tees, with a jacket thrown over if they're feeling fancy.

**Wednesday** \-  

They all pile out of the rented van in the parking lot of the Best Western. Yo-yo’s unfolding himself from the driver’s seat and wincing while Cameron hops out from the passenger’s, six hours’ worth of crumbs tumbling off her lap. In forty-five minutes, she will be back in the van to go pick Lev up from the airport, but for now she’s freed from the cramped confinement of van, and it’s time to go herd her nerds into their rooms.

_ Rooms _ . As in—more than one, as in ‘Mutiny is officially making enough money not to stuff all six of us into one room and oh, we sprung for two screens in the booth  _ and _ flying Lev in’. Space Bike is pulling in consistent sales, and Cameron is starting to think about quitting her job and focusing full time on Mutiny. They’ve got the brand-new demo for Pilgrim in the back, and Ryan and Tom have spent some time crunching numbers and looking at their followers across platforms to see if they could open a Kickstarter soon.

She feels optimistic. She feels  _ unstoppable _ . They even manage to acquire a luggage dolly to stick their screens on to wheel up to the room alongside their luggage so they don’t have to leave all the electronics in the van overnight.

Check-in goes smooth, and they divvy up the rooms. She puts her and Lev and Ryan in one, and the rest of the boys in the other. Cameron hauls her suitcase into the room, claims her bed, and closes the door on the sight of the guys all crowded around Tom as he opens up the newest demo and starts to walk them through the latest changes as she leaves them for the airport.

The thing is, she thinks, as she slides back into the driver’s seat of the van and adjusts it to her height, turning to check her mirror before backing this oversized monstrosity up, is that she’s earned this. It’s been a long, hard road, but all their work is finally paying off. It’s going to be a great weekend—

The self-congratulatory bullshit ends when a BMW cuts her off and she nearly rear ends it. Her hand punches down on an unfamiliar wheel and fails to find the horn, which is the only reason why there’s no blaring honk. Out of the side of the coupe, some guy’s hand sticks out of his rolled-down window, waves—a shitty excuse for an apology—before it speeds down the highway.

“Fuck,” Cameron says, and picks Lev up from arrivals fifteen minutes later with her hands still tight on the wheel.

He—and his duffle, and his tablet—slide into the passenger seat with a crinkle, one of no doubt many wrappers that her quick cleaning job missed.

“Already?” he says, when he sees her face, even before she hugs him, constrained by the seatbelt.

“No,” she says, letting him go. “Listen—it’s going to be a great weekend. I’m sure of it.”

**———**

**Thursday** -

Bos is usually the optimistic one. Cameron doesn’t know how it managed to rub off on her just in time for the convention, but the guys are kinda unnerved—barring Lev, who’s too busy dealing with the time change to be anything other than _present_. They get to the convention center early for set-up. Bos, alongside his optimism, stressed this.

Both screens and rigs traveled without a problem. They’ve got their info cards, a few hard copy collector's editions of Space Bike to sell, those cool posters Carl designed for them—in short, everything that was their responsibility to bring got there safe and sound. The booth is marked out too, ‘MUTINY’ and the number hanging against the curtain in the area on the floor reserved for the indie studios.

The problem is that’s all they have. The tables they paid for are missing. Every other indie booth has them, and she seriously considers stealing them from their neighbors on the right, who haven’t even arrived yet. But Cameron is absolutely sure the guy glaring at her from the booth opposite theirs—some sort of dating sim, maybe—would report them. Or maybe he just hasn’t had coffee yet. Set-up brings out the worst in people.

The floor is a mess right now. There are forklifts carrying huge crates for the big triple-a booths, center staff with gaff tape marking out the carpet, several men with walkie-talkies who are union only and therefore can’t  _ help _ find their missing things. Mutiny is huddled on their little carpet rectangle, shielded from some of the noise by their curtain, and at least equipped with their power supply.

“I’m going to go find someone who can find our tables,” she says to Yo-yo, who’s the only one of them not currently playing with power cords to find the optimum arrangement for electrocution.

“It’s going to break their hearts when I tell them they’ll need to unplug it all when the tables get here,” Yo-yo observes, looking over at the guys.

“ _ If  _ the tables get here,” Carl says, not looking up from trying to daisychain surge protectors together.

“I’ll find the tables,” she promises, and turns to navigate her way through the hall without getting run over by one of the forklifts.

As it turns out, con ops sends her to the room that the convention center’s actual headquarters resides in. A singular woman, walkie-talkie in hand, mans a folding table with a scattering of papers over it. Cameron strides in, all pep. She has the confirmation email on her phone, and a paper printout of every possible document related to the show in a folder. 

She will find her tables.

There’s another person in the room, a man in a navy-blue suit, speaking to someone on his phone. He looks so out of place in the windowless concrete of the room, but she’s here on a mission and the lady looks up as she approaches.

“Hi,” Cameron says, channeling Bos for this interaction and offering a shining smile, all bright teeth and cute head-tilt.

The woman grunts, and gestures for the sheaf of papers, which Cameron hands over obligingly, before launching into her planned speech.

“We’re booth one eight zero zero—”

“We’re out,” the woman says, and holds up Cameron’s carefully ordered confirmation pages. “No more.”

“What,” Cameron says.

“No more,” the woman says again. “Overbooked.”

“I paid for two tables—” she stresses, not raising her voice, and yes, she’s crinkling the papers with how tight she’s holding them.

“You’ll be refunded,” the woman says. “Nothing I can do.”

Cameron bites back a comment and walks away from the table, back towards the labyrinthine underground of the center. Ok. She can send Yo-yo out to the nearest Home Depot to buy some tables, it’s fine, they’ve got an emergency budget for things like this. They aren’t allowed to keep cars at the dock for much longer, so if he goes now maybe it’ll work out. Maybe if she finds some of the convention staff she can talk to them and see if they know what’s going on with the center’s obligation to provide the things she  _ signed a contract for— _

“Hey,” the man who was talking on his phone says, now no longer on a call. “I think I just heard that you need tables?”

He looks like he walked off Wall Street, all six feet and change of him, his suit sharp and dry-cleaner creased. He’s got a button-down shirt on, for fuck’s sake, not some pop culture reference tee, and it’s tucked into pants belted with what she thinks might be a designer belt.

What is he  _ doing _ here? Even the triple-A devs don’t dress like this. They’re all at hotels right now if they’re here, with those forklifts and union guys building their booths  _ for  _ them.

“I am,” Cameron confirms, looking up at him.

“You’re in luck,” he says, smiling with perfect teeth. He slides his phone back into his pocket, and  his hand stays on his hip. “They gave me extra. I was trying to arrange for a pick-up, but she said there wouldn’t be anyone available until seven tonight. If you can get them from the booth to yours and back before Sunday at midnight—”

“Yeah,” Cameron says, nodding. “I can do that. How much do you want for them?”

The man waves his hand. “Too complicated. Just take them. They’re blocking the aisle.”

She’s not going to argue with that. The woman at the desk doesn’t even look up as they leave, and the guy actually nearly makes a wrong turn once which Cameron corrects with a jerk of her head, and then they’re on the show floor. The booth he leads her to is right by the front. It’s pandemonium. Plastic wrap is being ripped off set pieces and huge wood crates, Indiana Jones style, are being dropped off in tape-denoted boxes. The signs aren’t up yet, and the tables are on a wheelie cart that he leads her to, between two of the biggest booths, so she can’t guess which one he's . He gestures at the cart.

“Thank you,” she says. “Really. I don’t know what we would have done without these.”

“You would have figured something out,” the man says. “Do you want help?”

Cameron tightens her hands around the bars of the cart and gives it a push; it moves easily enough. Corners might be tricky, but not impossible.

“No,” she says. “I can handle it.”

The man gives a little half-shrug. She wants to say ‘thank you’ again, but she doesn’t need to be anymore tongue tied, and Yo-yo and Lev are probably about to send one of the guys out to look for her by now.

She puts her back into it, and the cart starts to move, squeaking along.

“Who are you here with?” the guy shouts, trying to be heard as she gains distance, fighting over the noise of the show floor.

“Mutiny!” Cameron says, and gives him this embarrassingly awful little half wave as she manages to turn the corner with some dignity. Then he and his navy suit are out of sight, and she forgets about it in favor of getting her boys the tables before they start an electrical fire.

Later, in the hotel room, all of them aching and fighting over the pizza they ordered, Cameron leans over where Lev is draped on the bed to grab another slice, towel around her shoulders to catch the drips off her freshly showered hair.

(It is also a  _ great _ impromptu napkin.)

“Why were you gone for so long when you were getting the tables?” Ryan asks, from the hotel desk he’s commandeered. The demo is running great; he’s just fooling around on his laptop.

“Oh,” she says, and recounts the story for the assembled group.

———

**Friday** —

The hall had gone from bare to gamer paradise overnight. Banners drop from the ceiling, names and booth numbers stamped on them feet-high. On the elevator coming down, you went from being able to see everything laid out in a grid to being swallowed by booth walls from the larger displays, unable to see over them even enough to make out the bathroom signs.

When they’d arrived, all six of them, Dunkin Donuts styrofoam and assorted breakfast sandwiches in hand, the alleys had been filled with last-minute scurrying, especially in the indie section. Cameron sits on one of their four chairs—two for demo, two for staff—and pulls out her bagel, while Lev sets down a box on one of their two, beautiful, dressed tables, and pulls out a handful of the postcard info sheets for their game, glossy art on the front, and information and the code for the demo on Steam on the back. Carl is standing so far back from the booth that he’s nearly in their neighbors', judging their set up with a critical eye. Cameron raises her coffee to him, tipped back in the folding chair.

“How’s it look?” she asks, and a voice on her right says, “Not bad.”

It’s suit guy again, in a suit (again), hands in his trouser pockets and looking more like he ought to be working in one of the office buildings nearby rather than on the pre-show floor.

Slowly, Cameron lowers all four of the chair legs onto the ground. Lev’s stopped setting up the cards to look, and Yo-yo, in the middle of powering up their electronics, looks at her and mouths ‘is this the guy from yesterday?’

It is, obviously, and all Yo-yo does at her pointed look is shrug and go back to work. Carl, meanwhile, has stopped giving instructions to the other guys. The collective pause doesn’t last long, just enough to make suit guy uncomfortable.

“Am I interrupting?” he asks, brow raised.

“No,” Cameron says, and stands, while Lev says, “Yes.”

Suit guy lifts his hands, the universal gesture of ‘I don’t want trouble’ and takes a half step back. She looks back at Lev, who gestures at the mostly dark screens.

“Yes,” Cameron agrees, and grabs one of the cards from Lev’s perfect stacks and leans over the booth’s sides to pass it to suit man, arm outstretched and coffee cup in the other hand. “But come back later, once we have the demo running.”

The idea of this guy working his way through the crowd is a good one, and clearly someone must have told him about what to expect, because he grimaces. What a baby—he’s probably afraid of getting dirty, caught between unwashed fanboys and their merch.

She remembers something. Maybe Boz mentioned it, between his instructions on expense reports.

“There’s a mixer tonight, after the floor closes,” she says. “How about then?”

He takes the card, looks at the front, then flips it to the back.  “Sure,” he says, and tucks it into his jacket. He holds out his now empty hand to her. “I didn’t get to introduce myself before. I’m Joe.”

“Cameron,” Cameron says, and takes it, still leaning. He’s got a firm handshake, and he looks at her while he holds it—not overlong. When he lets go, Yo-yo doesn’t give her that long to bask.

“Cam, I need you to look at this,” and she’s distracted, immersed in making sure everything’s perfect for when the hall opens in fifteen that she doesn’t watch Joe walk away, let alone look over his shoulder at her.

And that’s how the day goes, a swirl of activity and repeating the same few lines about their game over and over again to everyone that comes to their booth, variations on a theme of enthusiasm and salesmanship. The line for the demo never stretches past ten people, but it’s nearly _always_ at ten people, a train that extends into the aisle and pulls people in who just want one of the cards that she’s handing out, if not to wait to play. Some of them will come back tomorrow, she thinks. Some of them make a point to mention it and even if only half of them are truthful, they’ll see the same steady stream anyway.

Lev makes them break in shifts for lunch; falafel ordered from some nearby restaurant and delivered. Cam only gets about half of it in her mouth before she’s called out to explain something. She doesn’t see what happened, but when she goes back for her food once the guy leaves the booth, it’s gone. She only has five minutes to mourn it before it’s on to the next thing. Yo-yo’s friends come over to say hello, and promises to buy all of Mutiny drinks on Saturday, but that’s all that’s all that stands out until gradually, the line starts to shrink, and the speakers announce an hour until close, half an hour, fifteen, and finally—

“We’re done,” Ryan says, and drops into one of the chairs.

The convention staff is still herding the last few stragglers out of the room, but the massive swell of people has left the space hollow. Papers litter the carpet among the other detritus of ‘too far from a garbage can’, and she thinks, 'alright, one day done' and she thinks, again, 'we can do this'. 

They clean up their booth, stack the cards neatly and restock what needs to be restocked. Some guy comes by and slaps Ryan on the back in greeting. Cameron gives him a half-salute when he glances back at her sheepishly. She’s not so heartless as to keep him indefinitely, and she waves off Carl too when she sees him glancing longingly at the escalators. That leaves her and Yo-yo and Lev at the booth, and the three of them can run the booth pretty effectively for what’s sure to be a pretty tiny crowd at the mixer. 

It doesn't end up being tiny, per say, but maybe her scale of ‘how many people is a lot’ is thrown off from the earlier full crowd. The mixer manages to feel intimate, with the little groups that people sort themselves into, the quiet chatter and the more in-depth explanations given to others in the industry as opposed to the ten minute pitches everyone’s been giving all day. Yo-yo gets a beer and wanders off in the direction of the VR section of the convention, and a guy Cameron only half recognizes as some popular streamer is taking all of Lev’s attention at one of the demo stations. 

She leaves to grab a beer for herself, and comes back to Joe at the booth, one hand on the back of the streamer’s chair, leaning in and cheering him on as the guy more or less plows through the level of Space Bike that Lev loaded up for him. He’s layering combos faster than even Cameron can, and it’s beautiful watching someone play like this, take this thing they made and working it better than they can.

A half second hesitation, and the guy thumbs a button clumsily. The bike crashes, the screen flashes, and all three men groan before Joe glances over his shoulder and realizes that she’s there. To his credit, he does it smoothly, touching the streamer on the shoulder and slipping him a card before he ambles over to Cameron, who folds her arms.

“Looks fun,” he says.

“Have you played?”

“I don’t need to play it to know it’s on its way to being one of the hottest independent games of the year,” and Cameron scoffs, walking past him to the second set of demo screens. Lev and his streamer friend have reloaded the level, and are occupied enough that Lev doesn’t even glance her way as she turns one of the screens back on.

“You don’t play?” she asks. Joe shrugs, not looking the least bit embarrassed to admit that where he is.

“Candy Crush,” he admits, making an abbreviated gesture with his beer. “Bejeweled.”

“What, you didn’t play Call of Duty with your friends in college?” she says, and he shakes his head.

“I was _busy_ ,” he stresses, sitting down in the chair across from the screen and leaning back. “With _classes_.” 

She shrugs, opening up the connected laptop and loading up the demo. _Not_ the floor one, but the longer one that’s for friends and family, the closest thing they have to a beta. The familiar blue screen of Pilgrim replaces the desktop background, and Cameron passes Joe the controller.

“It’s a puzzle game,” she says. “No fighting.”

Joe puts his beer by the side of his chair and takes the controller without fumbling it, and holds it _like_ he knows what to do with it. He tries out the various buttons, manages to figure out how to walk, how to pick up an item, and starts to venture out.

“No directions?” he says, and Cameron shakes her head, refolding her arms. “Nope.”

Joe frowns, and sets about trying to figure out what he’s supposed to do.

Pilgrim isn’t designed to be linear, or entirely solvable. Cameron didn’t make it to fit a niche, or to stream well (though she thinks it will). She didn’t make it to be hard, but it will be, if only because everyone expects a problem to be solvable if you throw yourself at it enough, if you break it. But Pilgrim is a journey. If enough people _understand_ that, if she can get it into the hands of the right players—

A gentle chime echoes from the speakers. Joe’s managed to teleport to the meadow, and he looks back at her, confused.

She takes pity on him.

“You had the mysterious rock when you went to the stone circle,” she says. His brows furrow, and the realization dawns on him, blooms on his face, and Cameron nods, slow. Joe turns back to the screen with a fiercer determination, the controller in his hand held tightly, now, and when he takes a drink of his beer, it’s with his eyes on the screen.

Cameron goes to grab another beer for both of them.

About two hours later, with Joe having solved two more steps of the puzzles, looking just as elated both times, when the bartenders are closing up shop and the stragglers are heading for the exits, he asks, “Would you like to share a cab?” and Cameron says, “Yes.”

———

He’s _big_ , she thinks, dizzy with it—dizzy with five beers and only half a lunch—but the dizziness is definitely more from the way his body covers hers as he pushes her against the wall right inside the door. Cam rests her hand on his shoulder, and pushes in counterpoint to her sloppy jump, which at least gets her legs around his waist. Joe catches on, and grabs her thigh, but the wall really does most of the work in holding them together.

“C’mon,” she slurs, head tipped towards the ceiling as he mouths along her neck. His hand is under her shirt, dragging up the side of her ribcage, her shirt shucked up on his wrist. She locks her knees tighter as he pulls back.

“Bed?” he asks, and she nods, nearly knocking their foreheads together as she grabs his face to hold him still (the room spinning) so she can kiss him. He tastes wine-sour, still articulate in ways she’s not. She wants the suit off, tugs at his collar to emphasize as much. He walks them to the bed, more than just a few steps (she thinks his company gave him a _suite_ ) and drops them onto it, Cameron’s legs tight around him the whole time as they bounce into the mattress and then settle.

Right as soon as he pulls away, she goes for his shirt while he works his shoulders to get the jacket off. He’d lost the tucked-in part in the cab on the way there, and she makes work of what’s left. Her hands roam over his chest and she stutters into stopping over the knots of scar tissue that stretch tight over his skin.

“They’re old,” he says, and a hook-up isn’t time to play show and tell beyond the obvious. She drapes her arms around his neck instead, and rather than talk they kiss, his hips rolling against her. She can feel the lump of his erection through his stupid trousers, and shifts so that the seam of her jeans is rubbing against her just to create that much friction. 

Joe draws back, and her legs fall from around his waist. He wipes the back of his hand against his mouth, his lips flushed red, and grins down at her, splayed out on the bed.

“Do you have condoms?” she asks, and he says, “Yes, bedside table,” but still goes to fetch them himself. Cameron props herself up on her elbow to watch him go, watch him drop his jacket and shirt over the back of the chair on the way there like they already aren’t wrinkled to hell and back. While he fusses with the wrapper, she flops back on the bed, shimming her jeans and underwear off in the same moment she uses to back up to the head of the king-size bed, her head appropriately pillowed on pillows that might just be down-stuffed.

(Mutiny is staying in this hotel next year.)

His belt and his pants get the same careful treatment that his shirt and jacket did, but he slinks back up the bed still in his boxers. Cameron kicks her clothes off to the side and shucks her shirt off. Again, he’s over her, pressing her into the mattress, and she just thinks a sort of breathless ‘wow’ as he uses the arm not holding himself up to slide out his boxes and toe them off onto the floor. He puts on the condom, and while it’s not exactly dignified, the lack of protest matter-of-fact way he does it puts him leagues above too many hookups. 

“Are you good?” he says, settling back into place. He runs a hand along her thigh, up and down, and when she nods a yes, his touch moves to his inner thigh, where she squirms and shifts on the bed. He rests his forearm next to her head, and he hovers over her, hip to hip, as he guides himself inside with his free hand. His teeth dig into his lip, a lock of hair flopped free and against his forehead, and the tight little exhale he lets out makes watching his face worth it. Cameron is three months away from dropping the title that she thinks with make Mutiny more than just a part-time gig and seven months into a dry spell compounded by stress and up until four AM coding binges, and Joe looked at her tonight the way Tom looked at Space Bike the first time she showed it to him, and she thinks, ‘I deserve this’.

“Good?” he says again, holding still, and she lazy wraps her arms around his neck (she’s going to scratch up his back, it’s always been an unfortunate habit of hers) and rolls her hips, testing. “Yeah,” she says, and Joe grins, all teeth.

They don’t talk much, after that, but they are loud. 

———

**Saturday—**

All hotel alarms sound the same. The dulled beeping drills into her skull, and she opens her eyes to see the screen reading 7:00 AM in red. The room is dark, curtains drawn against the morning sun, and the body next to her in the bed, bare skin touching hers, hand thrown a little too casually over her hip, goes, “Hey.”

She reaches out to hit the snooze before she even bothers rolling over to respond to Joe. The sheets are soft when she does, and even in the dim light she can make out his eyes, the shadow along his unshaven cheeks.

“Morning,” she says. She’s naked, but for the underwear that somehow made it back on last night, and he’s in a similar state, bare chest rising and falling. 

“Do you want coffee?” he asks, low. “What time do you need to be at your booth?”

“Eight thirty,” Cameron admits. 

He rises up on an elbow, glances around the room. 

“Why don’t you shower,” he says. “I’ll get some coffee.”

When she comes out of the shower, roughly toweling her hair, she’s expecting that he’ll have figured out to operate the coffee pot with the same deftness that the boys manage. Instead, there’s a tray waiting on the desk; a plate with pastries, another with fruit, a whole pitcher of coffee and the confetti-color assortment of different color sugar packets. 

He sprung for room service. Or rather, his company did, which has her wondering between the suite and the spread and the booth, just who he's here with.

Joe is hung over the sink outside the bathroom, running a razor over his cheeks. He finishes with the last white line of soap before splashing water over his face.

“Breakfast is on the table,” he says, unnecessarily, wiping his face dry. “There’s a clean shirt, if you want it.”

Cameron steps around him. Her jeans are laid out on the bed, her bra, her socks neatly in her shoes. On top of her shirt is another, black, men’s large, a logo that she can’t _quite_ recognize on the front, maybe she’s seen it in the hall for some new game, but on the back, it only takes a second before it clicks—

“ _That’s_ who you’re here with?” 

Joe’s pouring himself a cup of coffee when Cameron turns to look at him, her shock only partially exaggerated. He shrugs, taking the mug and the desk chair. “You never asked.”

Cameron scoffs, and drops her towel, dressing quickly. She holds the shirt for a second, checks it over. There’s nothing identifying written on it, no ‘STAFF’ written anywhere, so she puts it on, and balls up the yesterday's shirt.

She helps herself to a croissant, perching on the end of the bed. She digs her phone out of her jeans pocket, and her brows rise as she uses her thumb to flick through the numerous messages on her lock screen, all of them increasing in urgency. The very last one, sent maybe fifteen minutes ago from Bos, is the most succinct: ‘Are you dead?’

She opens it, and calls him rather than texting him back. Cam tucks the phone between her head and shoulder, tearing pieces off her croissant and tossing them in to her mouth.

“Not dead,” she says, when Bos picks up, before he can say anything, and Joe rustles the newspaper he’s reading, eyes meeting hers over the top of the headlines.

“Well, thank heavens!” Bos says, and Cameron smiles against the phone. “The way the boys were going on about it, I thought you were gone for sure.”

“They were worried?” she asks. The only thing— only thing— she hates about her team is how they sometimes still expect her to mother them. The rest of their bad behavior has been drummed out, mostly by Tom shrugging his shoulders when any of them try to go to him for things that _should_ be checked by her, or Yo-yo simply telling them to knock it off. If they couldn’t manage one night alone without her, if they did something to the rooms—

“Lev said you’d gone off with some man, but I said, I know Cam, she’s better than that—”

“ _Bos_ ,” Cameron says, cutting him off.

“Yes?” he drawls.

“I’m fine. I’ll be by the booth at nine, latest.”  

“Ok, ok,” he says, and maybe he’s sorting out another question, but even half of this conversation is too much for Joe to hear, so Cameron just says, “I’ll talk to you later, alright, Bos?”

“Alright,” he says, reluctant, and Cameron hangs up and shoves her phone in her pocket in one move, before Bos can say more.

Joe’s eyebrows say ‘what was that about?’ but what he says is, “Coffee?”

They don’t share a cab back to the convention center, but Joe calls it for her, and pays, which she finds out when she attempts to give the driver a wadded handful of bills and he shakes his head. Well, he can afford it.

Cameron extracts herself from the car and pulls at her new shirt, yesterday’s tucked under her arm. They have Mutiny ones in the booth, she’ll run to the women’s room and change before the floor opens. She flashes her badge for the guard at the door and winds her way through the booths before she reaches the indie section. 

Tom, swilling coffee, raises his hand in a salute. Lev and Yo-yo are fussing with one of the laptops, but look up when she comes back.  Carl and Ryan, both occupied with breakfast, stop eating long enough for Ryan to mumble, “Morning,” and then go right back to chewing. Cameron uses her foot to pull out the box they’ve used for swag, grabbing one of the shirts emblazoned with their logo, and heads for the restroom.

Her hair is still a little damp, so she towels it off with the shirt Joe gave her in the bathroom before pulling on the new shirt. Hands on the counter, she looks at herself in the mirror, turning her head to one side and then the other, making sure Joe didn't leave any marks. She trusts the boys not to mention them (they know what it would cost them) but she doesn’t want any of the numerous people who wander up to the booth to see them, because god knows most of them don’t have a filter. Satisfied, she splashes some water on her face, glad the only makeup she wears is eyeliner (and that’s waterproof) and winds her way through the aisles, which have gotten a bit more crowded as exhibitors filter in. 

Ryan hands her a styrofoam cup of coffee when she gets to the booth, and he cared enough to have it made the way she likes it.  

“Is it on?” says Joe’s voice, and with a mounting sense of horror, Cameron slowly turns on her heel in the direction of Joe’s booth. Hovering above it, there’s a massive screen, which now displays Joe, once more be-suited, standing on the booth’s stage, fitted with a microphone. On the lower left-hand size of the screen, it says ‘JOE MACMILLAN’ and then ‘EXECUTIVE MARKETING OFFICER, MICROSOFT’ below it, in slightly smaller font.

“Holy shit,” Carl says. “Cameron fucked the head of Xbox.”

“He’s not the head of Xbox, idiot,” Lev says, and probably explains the hierarchical structure of Microsoft and how exactly Joe fits into that, but all Cameron can think is, ‘oh my god’.

**———**

**Sunday—**

They all feel half dead on Sunday morning. Saturday night had left them dehydrated, that streamer friend of Lev providing them with invites to some party on a hotel’s rooftop bar, where Cameron had made use of the open bar.

But her hookup with Joe was overshadowed at the climax of the party, where the streamer friend of Lev’s had been seen making out with Lev, and Cameron had been happy to allow that to be Mutiny’s gossip fodder. Lev, much like Cameron had the day before, comes back to the booth the next day rather than the hotel room.

Their general low energy isn’t really noticed by the crowd, who are in a frantic state to get everything done that they’ve put off for the past two days. At some point after noon, they run out of the little postcards with the demo codes for Pilgrim, and not long after that, the Space Bike ones. Cameron straddles the line between being excited for five o’clock to hit so they can pack up and crash in the hotel, and nearly being wistful that it’s ending. They need to do more of these. Maybe not at full strength, but if they sent two people to some of the smaller conventions, they could develop a presence. Once they’re not entirely relying on Space B ike for revenue...

“Hey, Cam?” Yo-yo says, and she stops woolgathering to look at him.

At the edge of the booth, hands in pockets, stands Joe Macmillan. “I realized,” he says, stepping closer and pulling out his wallet, “that I didn’t give you my card.”

He passes one to her. Cameron takes it, not looking down, mostly so she doesn’t have to read ‘ _Joe Macmillan, Chief Marketing Officer_ ’ with her own eyes, but he says, “Wait. Do you have a pen?”

“Uh,” she says, articulate, “hang on,” and it’s Lev who discretely passes her one, which she immediately hands back to Joe. He reaches for his card back, too, and turns it over to write a number on the back, before pressing it and the pen into her hand.

“Call me sometime,” he says, and from behind her, Carl goes, “ _Oooh_ ,” like they’re in middle school again and she’s just been called to the principal's office. 

Cameron isn’t that annoyed, but she holds back a grin.

“Maybe I will,” she says, because once the embarrassment burnt off, Joe Macmillan had been a surprisingly good time.

**Author's Note:**

> I can be found on tumblr at flatpatterning. Throw some HACF (or any other fandom I'm in) prompts in my askbox.


End file.
